The Last Mission

by William Kennedy

  The new sign says Borough District Office. Apparently Whittingbridge has been swallowed into a larger administrative community.

  I look to the left for my lodgings. When I made my reservation at The Traveler, the young woman’s voice told me it was “Up a bit from the old Town Hall.” I remembered exactly where it was, but the distinctive inn surrounded by its own gardens is gone. Instead, The Traveler turns out to be two stories above a lobby restaurant, with a driveway cutting through to the back lot. I lug my garment bag through a long hallway and come into a small but tidy lobby. The young lady behind the desk checks me in, with the promise of a back room on the top floor. “You won’t hear the street noises,” she assures me. I’d like to ask her what in hell happened to the inn I remembered, but she can’t be more than twenty. She has no more memory of Whittingbridge than I have of Carthage.

  It’s a small room, designed to appeal to the business traveler. There’s a desk with a feature phone that has a computer jack built into its base. The plastic television looks very high-tech. The furnishings try to imitate Danish minimalism, and the bathroom is a molded shower tub with a telephone next to the toilet. The Traveler isn’t trying to be a home away from home, but more an office away from the office. I always thought of it as a refuge. Now I feel as if I’m still selling insurance.

  There’s a hint of the old town when I raise the blinds from the window. I’m looking over the roofs of low buildings on the next street, and I can see something of old lanes with half-timbered houses. There are still backyards that open out onto the meadows. I press my forehead against the glass and try to see the entrance to Angela’s street, but too much has been built up in between.

  The bar in the lobby dining room has a few distinguishing touches. There’s a dartboard with a boundary line painted on the floor. The tap handles are over two feet high and shine like the brightwork of a fine yacht.

  Despite my three-hour nap, I’m still unconnected to the local time zone. I feel as if it’s the middle of the night, when it is already midday. I order a gin, even though it is either too late or too early for it.

  “Salesman, are you,” says the barkeeper in that peculiar tone that changes a statement into a question. I don’t feel like conversation, but I know I’m going to need help in getting my bearings.

  “Was,” I admit, “but that’s not why I’m here. I was stationed here during the war, at the air base.”

  “Mildenhall?” he says, mentioning the American Air Force base that still operates as part of the NATO defense shield.

  “No, a long time before. I was at a base just a couple of miles south of here. It was called the Bridge. Named after the town: Whittingbridge.”

  He feigns great interest as he hands me a gin, neat, in a short glass. “When might that have been?”

  “The forties. World War Two.”

  “Oh, sure. I heard about that.”

  “Anything left of the place?” I ask hopefully.

  “I don’t think so. At least not that I know of, but I’ve only been here a few years. Night barman might know. He’s been here all his life.”

  There’s no point is asking him about the old inn. I doubt if he’s as old as the new building we’re standing in.

  On foot, the streets seem a bit more familiar. As soon as I turn off Center Street, which has replaced Cardinal Road, the commercial facade disappears. The old houses remain architectural reminders of the first Elizabeth, but propped up and pointed. The windows have been changed to modern panes, but they are still masked with the same sheer curtains. The most obvious differences are the cars that are parked bumper to bumper, with two wheels up on the brick sidewalk, and the colored glow of the televisions in every parlor.

  I follow a familiar turn and find that Bridge Street is still Bridge Street, leading out to an insignificant bridge that crosses one of East Anglia’s countless tidal estuaries. I walk between the rows of small houses, attached one to the other, but separated by the distinctive gardens and cast-iron fences that mark front yards. And then I’m standing in front of her house.

  I recognize it only by its location, and for a moment I think I must be on the wrong street. The house is completely different, with the windows enlarged and a skylight bulging out from the tile roof. The garden of wildflowers has been paved over, turning the front yard into a playpen with a tricycle and a toy wagon. Then I notice the chimney with a poorly cut slate over its top to serve as a weather screen. I remember the decorated facias. It’s the same house, evolved to a more casual lifestyle.

  I brought her home here on many nights, pushing open the iron gate very carefully to keep it from banging. I lingered for as long as she let me in the dark privacy of her doorway before I began the long hike back to the base. Each time, I worried that I might not ever see her again. That was the worst part of the prospect of dying on the next mission—that I would never hold her in my arms again.

  Suddenly, I’m sorry I came back. Emotions are churning. Conflicts of loyalty and duty, long suppressed, are sharpening their swords. I’m staring at the damage wrought by the tide.

  But the fascination is irresistible. As I have dinner at The Traveler, I keep glancing up at the night barman. He will certainly remember. He’s lived here all his life, and he’s nearly as old as I am. It’s a point of decision. If I talk to him, I’ll most certainly have to face again the issues that I buried at the bottom of my footlocker. I may come to realize that I made the wrong choices, or worse, allowed them to be made for me, but when I push back from the table, I walk straight to the bar.

  “A nightcap, sir,?” he says. And then, when he puts the snifter in front of me, “Salesman, are you?”

  “No, a flyer. I was here during the war.”

  He doesn’t have to ask; he knows which war I’m talking about.

  “Ah, yes. Come to see the old place, did you? Lots of you lads used to come back for a peek, but you’re the first in quite some time.”

  “I may be the last. There weren’t many of them younger than I was.”

  “Ah, you’ll probably come back again yourself,” he says graciously.

  I ask him if he’ll join me, and he seems genuinely pleased. He pours himself a snifter and than adds a measure to mine. “To the men at the Whittingbridge air base,” I propose, and we raise the glasses together.

  “I’m going out there in the morning,” I tell him.

  He shakes his head. “Nothing there. A couple of streets with houses. Some of it fenced in for the horses. Nothing like it was.”

  “Will I find it?”

  “Well, there’s a plaque. It’s supposed to be right where the control tower was. Not much of a tribute for what you fellows did.”

  “Do you remember it?” I ask hopefully.

  “Oh, sure. I was a schoolboy then, living in Norwich. Used to bicycle to all the bases, thinking I’d be a flyer myself. I was disappointed when it was over before I could get into it.”

  I’m about to tell him that he was lucky he didn’t get into it, but then I realize I came back here because I think it may have been the time in my life when I was most alive. I think I may have been lucky to have been part of it.

  “Do you remember any of the people who lived here?” I ask.

  “Some,” he says. “But I didn’t settle in Whittingbridge until late in the sixties. Even then, there’d been a great many changes since the war days.”

  I try a long shot. “I was hoping to look up a police inspector named Browning. He was with the Norfolk Constabulary at the Whittingbridge station.”

  There’s no flicker of recognition.

  “Look up his family, I mean. God, he’d have to be ninety by now, if he’s still alive.”

  The barman shakes his head. “Don’t recall him, but everything’s been reorganized. There are no more borough constabularies. We’re part of the London district. I’m afraid you’re going to have your hands full finding him.”

  I pretend to be grasping for a long forgotten name. “How about
the Priests? Thomas Priest. I think there was a daughter…Angela…or Gloria.”

  His eyes light. “Back on Bridge Road?”

  “Yes!” I have to stop myself from springing across the bar. “I think that’s what it was called: Bridge Road.”

  “Sure I knew the Priests. Sarah died pretty soon after I moved here, but Tom was around for a long time. Used to walk up here for his pint. God, he must be dead by now. It was because of his health that he had to leave. Went to live with a daughter in London, I think.”

  “Angela?”

  “I wouldn’t know the name. The daughter must have gone to London before I got here. I just heard talk.”

  We chat for a bit longer—long enough so that we exchange names, his being Arthur Lyons. Long enough so that he offers to meet me for breakfast and take me down to the air base.

  He looks different in the morning, wearing a jacket and tie and a small plaid cap. His face is long and thin, and there’s a bright-red shine on his cheekbones. Definitely a Norman, I decide, descended from the Viking raiders who brought their boats up the estuaries and all the way to Cambridge.

  Lyons accepts my invitation to drive and pulls out through the underpass into a street that is alive with traffic. Almost immediately we are out into the country, following a paved road to the east.

  “There was a road over there,” I say, pointing out through my side window. “Passed along the fence line between two fields. I remember a farmhouse with a lantern on the porch. It was sort of a milestone when I was walking back to the base.”

  He nods. “Brightman’s place. Old Adam Brightman had a few hundred acres of pasture and a flock of sheep. Never had two coins to shake together. His nephew sold the place for a fortune. Warehouse complex went in.”

  “Sheep,” I smile. “I remember trying to get their droppings off my shoes.”

  Arthur turns off the highway and then goes north from the turnaround. Almost immediately we’re in a cluster of houses—pleasant, modern cottages with gardens in front and a skylight in the same position on every roof. He goes to the end of the street and swings into a parking space that’s behind two stone benches. Just forward of the benches is a stone pillar, chest high, with a metal plaque angled on its top:

  In Fond Memory

  Of the United States Airmen

  Of the

  396th Bombardment Group

  Who flew from here to bring liberty

  To people everywhere.

  Friends Allies Comrades

  “Not much,” Arthur Lyons had said the night before. But enough, I thought. When it was all over, we all went our own ways. We had no more reason to stay together. A marker that recalls that we were once friends, allies, and comrades probably says it all.

  “The tower was right here,” Arthur explains. “The houses are built on one of the runways. The other two were out there.” He points out onto the meadow that is still perfectly flat, but is now covered with clusters of grass.

  “Can we go out there?”

  “Of course, but be careful. You may have to clean your shoes.”

  They poured concrete here. American engineers worked with English contractors cutting troughs two feet deep and a hundred feet wide. Water oozed up through the mud. East Anglia is like Holland; it’s all marshland that was diked and drained. Planting a fence post and digging a well are the same thing. They brought crushed rock down from the North and packed it down to form three six-thousand-foot runways, shaped into a triangle. Then they built a cement factory and poured concrete. It was probably second-rate workmanship, but everyone knew that it didn’t have to last forever.

  “The bombers were gone almost immediately,” Lyons says, “but the Yanks were flying in and out for several months. Then the RAF had it for a while. Jet fighters. Vampires.” He smiles. “I went right down to enlist, but in those days farm boys didn’t get to fly jets—at least not in England.”

  I look east, where there were barracks hidden in a stand of trees. South of the barracks were the storage sheds and the parking areas where the planes were taken for maintenance and repairs. It was a whole city, probably as big as Whittingbridge, certainly bigger than the interlocking circles of houses that they put up in its place.

  I walk toward the woods. Arthur falls into step behind me. “All the buildings are down,” he says, guessing what I’m thinking and trying to cushion the shock. “They were boarded up for years. The builders tore them down when they were putting up the houses so they wouldn’t be an eyesore. Lot of young people—shiftless kind that we had in the sixties—had moved in. Not much for manners, that lot!”

  I’m at the edge of the woods, where our administrative offices were. This is where I first met Detective Sergeant Browning. Strange, but it’s like yesterday. He’s standing in the doorway to the duty room, in the process of removing his hat.

  Then

  I had flown three missions as copilot to First Lieutenant Jimmy Brombeck in a B-17 named Stunning Stella. The Stunner, with a nude Petty girl painted on her side, had been the lead plane in the first squadron of our formation—a position she was given because Jimmy Brombeck wasn’t very gifted at formation flying. As the first plane, everyone else had to form up on us, so all we had to do was stay close to the rest of the group and enjoy listening to Colonel Mast chew the asses of pilots who weren’t tight up against us.

  The first trip had taken us to Holland, where we hit submarine pens on the North Sea. We came in over the water and turned around in a hurry, so there wasn’t much flak. Because it was a short trip, we had fighter escorts all the way. Everyone made it back, the only injury being a gunner who had gotten his thumb caught in the bolt of his weapon. The bar in the joined huts that served as the officers’ club opened early and stayed open late. Four of us decided we had talent and sang college fight songs until morning. The second trip was to the Ruhr, with flak all the way, and swarms of German fighters waiting to pick us up as soon as our escorts turned back. We lost twelve planes out of the group—two out of our squadron. The bar closed an hour after it opened and we all lay silently in our bunks, trying not to notice the turned-up mattresses on the other officers’ beds.

  Brombeck had become a close friend. He was a big guy with a heavy neck and a round head that actually looked good in a crew cut. He chewed gum—occasionally blowing a bubble into the oxygen mask he had forgotten he was wearing—and talked constantly to his airplane. As we revved the engines at the end of the runway, he would begin his monologue.

  “Okay, Stella baby, just hold on tight until you’re so hot you’re startin’ to smoke. That’s it, baby, just let it build. Keep growlin’ till you can’t take it no more.”

  When the engines were about ready to tear free from the wings, he’d signal me to release the brakes. The bomb-laden plane would try to leap forward, but it was dragging just too much weight. It would begin to move with agonizing leisure.

  “C’mon Stella. Get the lead out. You’re supposed to be leaping on me, not going out for a cigarette. C’mon, you lazy-ass broad. You see those trees ahead? We gotta go over them. Ain’t no room under them.”

  We needed 110 miles an hour to get into the air, but more like 130 if we wanted to stay there. We were only making about thirty, had used up a quarter of the runway, and our tail was still dragging.

  “Let’s go, little lady. Haven’t I been good to you? Don’t I make you happy?”

  A third of the runway—the tail wheel was off the ground, but we still hadn’t hit fifty. By this time I could taste yesterday’s breakfast. The four tons of bombs we were carrying weren’t armed, so in theory they were perfectly safe, but if the plane stopped abruptly, the bombs had a tendency to keep going. Four tons of bombs flying forward through the cockpit and out the nose were deadly, even if they didn’t explode. And of course the wings were full of high-octane aviation gasoline, which was probably more volatile than the TNT in the bomb bay. Planes that didn’t get over the trees generally ended up as a charred hole in the ground, with wi
ng tips on the side and a tail at the back.

  “Hey, bitch! Yeah, you! I’m talking to you. We just passed the point of no return. There ain’t enough room for you to stop, so if you were thinking of lying around for the day, just forget it. You hear me?”

  Two thirds of the runway—we were reading ninety miles an hour, and accelerating more rapidly. If Brombeck lifted the nose, we probably would have picked up off our wheels, but a couple of seconds later we’d settle back down, tail first. He had to hold her down until we got more speed.

  “Listen, Stunner, I ain’t kidding around. We ain’t got all night. Either get it on now, or we’re through…”

  “One-oh-five,” I called. Three quarters of the runway was gone. The trees were so close that I could see individual leaves. If I had been in the left-hand seat, I would have been trying to lift off, but Jimmy Brombeck was still holding the tail up, waiting for still more speed.

  “One-twenty,” I called. My voice was pleading.

  Jimmy held the yoke steady. “Okay, Stella, I’ve had it with you. This is your last chance.” By this time there wasn’t a sound on the intercom—not even the hiss of people breathing. Everyone in the front of the plane was staring at the trees. The crewmen in the back were peeking out the side gun ports. They knew the runway markings. They didn’t have to see the trees to know they were there.

  “One-thirty,” I screamed.

  “Gear up,” Jimmy answered, but he wasn’t pulling back on the yoke. I hit the lever and watched the hydraulics suck the main wheels up into the engine nacelles. We were flying, but just about at the same altitude as when we were rolling. Then Brombeck pulled back on the yoke.

  There was an instant of absolute horror. The nose was tipping upward, but the plane wasn’t climbing. We were still hurtling forward, our tail only inches off the ground, our nose not yet half the height of the trees. Fifty-fifty, I thought.

  Suddenly the trees began to drop. I couldn’t see them over the nose, but they were still there when I leaned to the side window and glanced ahead, and then they were under us. A flash of green, moving so fast that I couldn’t see the branches—a quick buzzing sound as the four propellers chopped the tips off the leaves.